In what can only be described as a very awkward moment, this is JoAnne Kloppenburg yesterday looking for new ways to define winning even as she asks WI taxpayers to foot the $1M bill for what will end up being a fruitless recount.

In what is one of the most amazing turnarounds I have ever seen in an election of this import, an entire city (Brookfield, WI) was missed on election night. An entire city. 14,000 votes. When the votes were tallied on Thursday, David Prosser lead the race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court by 7500. After canvassing, Prosser now leads by just over 7200 votes, or somewhere just under half a percent of all the votes cast which means automatic recount.

To add insult to injury, Kloppenburg only netted 54 more votes in Dane County where she had just crushed Prosser on election night. However, with same day registration and Dane being the most liberal county in Wisconsin (and home of the University of Wisconsin-Madison), I am betting on voter fraud there.

The recount will begin the week of April 18th. While I do not think the Left can manufacture over 7,000 votes to get Kloppenburg over the top, we are taking this very seriously. Too much is riding on this election. We’ll keep you posted.

Folks, there is a difference between what the AP reports and the actual canvassing numbers. Canvassing numbers are the numbers that get certified-they are the only ones that count. Because of that, David Prosser’s lead is growing and I think will continue to grow.

Especially if the Brookfield rumors are true (ie, 14,000 uncounted votes in an area Prosser won big on Tuesday).

For those of you following WI (and if you’re a political junkie, how could you not be?), all the precincts are in and the margin between JoAnne Kloppenburg and David Prosser is 204 votes. Out of 1,479,000+ votes cast. That is amazing. What is even more amazing is that the Prosser team, and those around them, thought they were going to get crushed under the tidal wave of the trial lawyers and the public sector unions. Suffice it to say, I am pretty sure Wisconsin has never seen a Supreme Court election with this much riding on it. At stake are Scott Walker’s Budget Repair Bill and Tort Reform, both already signed into law, both likely to end up in front of the court.

So what can we take away from last night?

1.) The union bosses are stunned and so is Team Prosser. The paid union thugs got their folks out (dead ones included, I am sure) and were met, toe to toe, by the tea party. The result? A draw in what was supposed to be a rout.

2.) The recall elections of the WI state Senators are not going to be as easy as the union bosses thought.

3.) The unions have to reckon with the new kid in town, the tea party.

This thing is far from over, but I think it’s going to be a wild ride from here.

Make no mistake. What happens today in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election matters. It matters because everyone knows what is at stake: Scott Walker’s Budget Repair Bill and the newly signed tort reform law. If David Prosser retains his seat on the court, it is likely that both survive and the judiciary continues to let the legislature do what it is supposed to-enact laws. If JoAnne Kloppenburg wins, it is likely that both will eventually be overturned and the last bastion of the Left, an activist judiciary, will once again rule Wisconsin under the watchful eye of Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson.

Wisconsin also matters because it has become ground zero for the fight against the oligarchy of the public sector union bosses. This isn’t about collective bargaining. One thing left untouched by Scott Walker was the ability for public sector unions to collectively bargain for wages. What Walker has done is one, told the public sector unions they will contribute to their pension and healthcare plans. Two, he has taken away the monopoly long enjoyed by the public sector unions. Does anyone else think it’s odd that the school districts in WI have to purchase their healthcare from an entity owned by the teachers’ union, WEA Trust? 64% of all the school districts in WI, because of collective bargaining, have to purchase health insurance for their teachers from WEA Trust. Under Walker’s plan, no school would be forced, through collective bargaining, to purchase healthcare from WEA Trust. The total savings? $68 million per year (for more on this, go here). In other words, someone is getting rich off this scheme and the people getting soaked are the taxpayers.

Meyerson writes: Who knew? What with conservatives’ continual demonization of public-employee unions, the support that Americans show for public employees’ rights has to come as a surprise. Three factors, I believe, informed the public’s judgment. The first was the demonstrations themselves, which put very human and sympathetic faces — those of teachers, nurses, cops, and firefighters — on Walker’s targets. The second, which followed from the first, was that it’s hard to believe that those teachers, nurses, cops, and firefighters, once you see them, are really the folks who are making out like bandits in our no-end-in-sight jobs recession.

And third, Americans aren’t keen on the idea of taking away long-established rights, particularly when doing so fundamentally destabilizes the social balance of power that we take (or took) for granted. In the industrial (or post-industrial) Midwest, which was not only the stronghold for manufacturing unions but also the place where public-sector workers first won collective-bargaining rights, unions are a venerable yin to businesses’ yang. Wiping them off the map, as Walker, Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, and other Republicans are trying to do, is not only undemocratic but violates every precept of Burkean conservatism. Stripping Americans of their rights and uprooting the social order isn’t high on the public’s to-do list.

First, Meyerson calls the demonstrations in WI “human and sympathetic.” I was there. They were neither. Secondly, Meyerson incorrectly says Walker targeted policemen and firemen. Both were left out of the budget repair bill. Thirdly, the public sector union employees are making out like bandits in WI. For more on that, go here. I could go on and on about Meyerson’s wishful thinking, but why bother.

The bottom line is that the American public is awakening to the fact that the public sector union bosses are fleecing them to the tune of millions and millions of dollars and it has to stop before more states become insolvent. End of story.

“You can’t spend more money than you make,” Cuomo said on February 5, setting a tone for his administration. “There are only two groups of people who don’t understand this. No. 1 is the leadership of the New York State legislature. No. 2 are my daughters.”